Hi all,

Since I've been spending quite a bit of time with the instrument lately, I'd like to share some of what I do, some personal reflections on my own practice, and hear some of the same from you who are willing to share.

Recently retired - I now have no excuse for lack of time...it's exhilerating, other than that I wish I had this kind of time when I was younger - but hey, spilled milk : )

My current goal is to relearn every piece or song (that I still like) that I had spent many hours with in the past....which doesn't mean I ever learned to play them at a performance level....now that crosses a LOT of styles, but most of it involves technically challenging pieces. For some reason my ear went to these types of things, and it may well be because playing technically challenging pieces is one of my relative strengths.

So my morning routine consists of watching Netflix while I work through reading the pieces I'm working on - I started with classical pieces. I know divided attention is less effective - but F#$ it - that's the way I enjoy practicing lol

What I learned - is how hard (that is, how long it takes) for me to memorize a full piece and play it at performance level. The smart thing I've done in my recent years is create a list of songs/pieces that I continually revisit. The pop song list has about 50 songs, and the recent classical list has only 5. My 5 classical pieces are:

1.) Bach - Allemande from 3rd cello suite
2.) Asturias - Albeniz
3.) Variations on a theme of Mozart - Sor
4.) Chopin Prelude op 28 no 20 - as transcribed by Liona Boyd
5.) Romance (anonymous)

It's been 2 months of several hours of morning practice - and I'm still quite far away from playing these 5. I realize also that I learned parts of these pieces well, but never actually learned the whole piece - for example, the beginning of the Asturias is relatively straightforward arpeggios, but the slow part is actually quite beautiful and not so easy (for me) to read. Since my sight reading is poor, quite often it takes me quite a bit of time to get my fingers in the right place and play through even 1 or 2 measures fluently....and then lots more time to combine measures into a fluent line, section etc. I have to annotate my pieces extensively with every position change, fingerings that might be obvious to a good sight reader, and chord diagrams. I'm going to later share an example. I have to do the same for flamenco pieces.

--> I'm wondering if many of you have to perform such labor to learn a new piece, and if you have any tips, shortcuts, etc.
--> Also - are there other more elementary practice exercises/strategies that would speed up my pace at the above ? I don't think so, but I'm open to suggestions.

I can do the above for about 1 to an hour and a half - and then I'm fatigued, usually 'classical-music-outted' for the day.

After that I can move to flamenco for 1/2 hour+, depending, but after that I'm 'nylon-stringed' out.

I do have an end goal (which has been constantly changing lol) - which is being able to confidently perform 45 minutes to an hour of my favorite pieces on a nylon string guitar. You may recall I was looking for easier classical pieces and thought mixing genres would be a bad idea - but all of you convinced me otherwise (thanks for that). I now plan to mix classical, flamenco, and even a few Steve Howe solo pieces. BTW Eddie - I will share a youtube video of 1 or 2 of the above, because I know you're looking forward to it lol

Ah -this post is already longer than I planned - I'll save my pop practice routine for another post (depending on the response to this one).

As I always say - thanks in advance for your friendship, comraderie, and all the advice and sharing you guys generously give.

Best,
Joe

BB/RB 2025
Windows 10